A band that I have been spinning pretty heavily this week is Crystal Castles, and their new self titled album. This Toronto based duo produces catchy chiptune electronica straight out of your favorite NES cartridge. The mastermind behind this project is Ethan Kath who uses modded keyboards to recreate the lo-tech blips that make the Nintendo generation feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Add to that the squelching vocals of Ms. Alice Glass and you get an enticing palette of aural experimentations. The album runs a pretty wide gamut of tempos, which is pretty well illustrated in the first two tracks.

Untrust Us—While heavily layered the track is relatively light. Overall, Untrust Us flows smoothly and sounds like it’s pumping you up for a major boss battle, which would be track two…

Alice Practice—The polar opposite of track one, hard edged and aggressive with bomb-blast bass lines. This track features Glass, and she tears it up with her shrill vocals. This track is reminds me the most of Hanin Elias’ work with ATR, or the Swedish group 64Revolt. A side-note, if you are trying to show a guy who’s into shoegazer(?) music how awesome Crystal Castles are, then this is not the right track for him.

The rest of the album follows a similar formula, light grooves are held in sharp contrast to the heavier beats. Some tracks are entirely instrumental and those are the ones that will be easiest for your indie-rock chummies to digest. For those of you who like to get up and (slam)dance then you might skip around to the tracks with Glass’ backing vocals. All told, this is a super-sweet album, and a must listen for kids into all flavors of electronic music.